May 15, 2005: TRANSFORMING MONROE

It's got dozens of luxurious homes worth $300,000 to $2.5 million, all with sunrise-on-the-water views, high ceilings and hardwood floors.

There's a world-class fitness center with a recent $11 million face-lift.

And don't forget the gazebo and the marina.

No wonder Hampton Mayor Ross A. Kearney II has real estate developers begging him for a shot at Fort Monroe.

"It's one of the most prime pieces of property in the Hampton Roads area," says Dan Hassett, regional vice president of Virtexco Inc., a construction company that spent several years and $25 million fixing up the base's housing. "You've got water views all around."

You've also got an estimated 1,300 places in the 570-acre site where buried explosives might have to be removed.

Not to mention National Historic Landmark status, putting it among the crown jewels of historic and architectural sites in the nation.

That's the conundrum of Fort Monroe, now that it's officially on the Pentagon's base closure list.

If the Army marches away, Monroe has all the earmarks of the next upscale mix of expensive housing and more expensive office space, a place that could bring in the bucks that would erase the memory and effects of the 3,500 paychecks the military wants to move elsewhere.

But Fort Monroe also has those two big strings attached - historic and environmental - that might severely restrict what can be done there.

For now, Kearney and other Hampton officials say they don't want to talk much about what benefits might result from the closure. Officially, the focus is on saving the base, not selling it.

But those same politicians can't help but allude to the possibilities.

In the past few months, he says, several developers have brought the city proposals for turning the property into a tax-producing casserole of residential, office and commercial spaces.

If it comes to that, Kearney says, the quality of the proposals and the people involved show that "it's not going to be helter-skelter, with Motel 8s and things like that."

Kearney even has visions of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by luring developers to build high-rise office buildings designed for federal workers.

Under this vision, some of the 22,000 men and women who must leave leased offices in Northern Virginia because those buildings are not sufficiently protected from terrorists would come to Hampton.

The reason they have to leave the offices is that new rules for protecting Department of Defense workplaces call for physical barriers to thwart car bombers, including an 82-foot buffer around each building.

Kearney notes that there's a bigger buffer than that at Fort Monroe, plus a moat and a secure checkpoint that already meets military security regulations.

No one questions that there are already some high-end houses at the base. Hassett's company spent five years and $25 million in tax money fixing up about 100 homes there, ending in 2000.

Much of the cost was because the company was repairing parts of a historic site, with some housing dating to the 19th century.

But the rest was because the fix-ups were first-class, made to order for generals and other high-ranking officers, he says.

"They were unbelievable houses with unbelievable views of the water," he says. "The last one we did there was the house for the four-star general," a 12,000-square-foot, four-story building that entailed $1.2 million of work and would now be worth $2 million to $2.5 million, he says.

Twelve-foot ceilings, heart-pine floors, tin and metal decorative ceilings, new kitchens - all of today's trendy and expensive features were put into these buildings, Hassett says.

On another part of the base, $11 million was spent on what base officials routinely call a "world-class" fitness center - a converted YMCA that boasts the latest in exercise equipment, including a 20-foot climbing wall.

The base also manages a marina, a meeting center with catering facilities that can host sessions for 10 to 350, and a collegial campus for the Army's Training and Doctrine Command.

There are also a number of substandard properties the military has been planning to demolish or replace.

Hampton has been complaining for years that it doesn't have enough high-end housing to attract corporate executives. It has coveted a community like Kingsmill or one of the other residential showplaces on the Peninsula.

Fort Monroe could be that place, real estate experts say.

But that might take a lot of time. And luck. And work.

And lawyers.

If Monroe stays on the closing list, one of the first hurdles to figuring out what happens next will be deciding who owns it.

That won't be easy, predicts A. Paul Burton, Hampton's city attorney.

The city hired a real estate lawyer to do some research just in case what happened Friday happened, he said.

He found out that the base comprises a number of properties, assembled from 1838 to about 1917. There's even a two-acre splotch of land where a lighthouse for shipping traffic was acquired in 1798, during the administration of John Adams, the nation's second president.

Several, but not all, key pieces of the land that are now combined and known as Fort Monroe had what lawyers call reversion clauses as part of their sale to the federal government, says Burton - the original sale laid down conditions for what happens if the Army stops using the land.

"It's probably one of the most complex land title situations you've got around here," Burton says.

The only thing that is clear is that the state and city have no easy claim to any of the properties once the Army leaves, he says.

Kearney says he's confident the city will have a significant say in what goes on at the site. That's in part because of a promise from Gov. Mark R. Warner and in part because the city has formed a redevelopment authority for the fort property, the first step toward getting the government's assistance in making a transition to nonmilitary use.

Normally, federal law gives other federal agencies first crack at a property coughed up by the military. But the sales and contracts that helped assemble Monroe make that normal picture murky at best, Burton says.

Federal and state authorities declined to comment on what stake they might hold or claim, saying it's too early to make such statements.

Another complication is the environmental laws that govern the transfer of military property.

Normally, all hazards have to be removed or neutralized before the transfer can take place, a requirement that in previous rounds of base closings has delayed the process for more than a decade in some cases, leaving sites surrounded by fences and "No Trespassing" signs.

There is a provision that allows a local government or private owner to take possession - and the responsibility for cleanup - and thereby speed up the process.

That might be riskier than normal at Fort Monroe because the extent of the environmental problem is so poorly known. Cleanup estimates, all more than a decade old, range from $22 million to $263 million. Until the last two rounds of closings, the uncertainty and potential magnitude of the environmental cleanup has helped spare the fort from closure.

The whole idea of putting a fort there was to give the government a place to park massive cannons capable of hitting ships that might dare to enter the James River and Chesapeake Bay. That was back in the 1800s, when ships, not planes and missiles, ruled the day.

Since then, cannons, rifles and other weapons have been fired there, mostly for practice and testing, from the mid-1800s through World War II. No one thought those chemical-laden, toxic lead target-practice items were a problem when they sank into the beach and soft soil, but they were wrong. In addition to the chemical poisons, some of them can still explode.

The most recent study of how big and expensive a problem exists was completed in 1995.

The researchers found more than 73,300 objects buried on the grounds of the fort that might be old ordnance. An additional 79,900 were found in the moat around the stone fort, but no one contemplates digging there.

After unearthing 581 objects outside the moat and finding out that belt buckles, a horse harness and other harmless objects accounted for most of the underground metal, the study concluded that there were probably only 1,309 objects of concern outside the moat. Most were toward the north end of the property.

The only people who needed to be concerned were those who might be in construction or other jobs where digging was necessary, the study found.

Of course, there is the alternative of not digging at all. Nearly all the fort's acreage and structures are considered historic as a matter of law, given their inclusion on the national historic register and status as a national historic landmark, the top level of historic status bestowed by Congress.

That doesn't make the site immune to development or demolition but legally commands consideration for its nonmonetary value, says Kathleen Kilpatrick, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

"The assumption is that important resources will be saved unless there are no reasonable alternatives," she says of the law protecting these sites.

It's too early to say what that could mean for Fort Monroe, Kilpatrick says. That's echoed by the U.S. National Park Service, where a spokesman says it won't even consider evaluating the site for federal parkland until Congress and the president make a decision on base closings later this year.

The Pentagon's base closing announcement said the Army would work with Kilpatrick's agency "to ensure that historic properties are continued to be protected."

If thoughts turn from saving Fort Monroe as an active military base to saving Fort Monroe for posterity, Kilpatrick says, the best question would be, "How do you put it back to work for the area?"

That might entail appropriate use as a historical tourist attraction that would build on the area's existing treasures of Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown.

Maximizing the value of the site for tourists might not be incompatible with developing some land for residential or commercial use, she says.

Michael Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum, says the question of value isn't just monetary in this situation.

"Fort Monroe is important, not only to Hampton but to America," he says. "There are few places that have its historic significance."

It is the first and largest fort in the United States made of hand-cut stone, which by itself provides architectural and historical clout worthy of respect, he says.

But it's also a part of the nation's soul, where Gen. Benjamin F. Butler got the emancipation ball rolling by declaring slaves who'd come there in the early days of the Civil War "contraband" and therefore not subject to being returned to their masters under existing federal law.